A portfolio of my past writing, and new stories as I develop them. Almost always deliberately funny.

Wednesday, November 5, 2014

The Pursuit of Happiness: Love

Ronald Coleman and Madeline Carroll in "The Prisoner of Zenda" -- the romantic paradigm.

Love, o love is sweetly flowing

On its banks are lilies growing

And the waters all bestowing

Love, love, beautiful love.

Come ye children, sweetly gather

Learn to bless and love each other

It will bind your hearts together in

Love, love, beautiful love.

Shaker song

First of all, this not about filial or fraternal love. This
is about the love you sign up for.

I had planned this to be to be a rollicking survey of my romantic
relationships. After a short time, it became clear that would be
sad, painful, and embarrassing. I have been a romantic fool.

In fact, if I look at it from a crazy, non-constructive way,
my every romantic relationship up to the present one has been a failure. Which
is how I looked at it. And, what’s even less helpful, the details of these
failures are mostly locked away inside me. I learned little over a remarkably
long period of time with a number of different beloveds.

I know nothing about women. Ask around. Particularly women. My
conceptions of love were formed by poets and paper-heart makers, Hollywood and
Tin Pan Alley. As far as I can tell, my ancestors felt brief urges of passion,
mated, and then settled down into monochrome normality. (After they died, I
found out about their deeply repressed, tragic emotional lives. Still waters,
etc.) The particular example my parents set was not particularly comforting or
helpful. As a kid, when I thought at all about girls I cued on love songs,
romance films, and storybook endings. The peculiar cultural window I looked
through made me model myself much more on Ronald Coleman than Peter Fonda. You
can guess the results.

When I began grappling with the opposite sex (fortunately,
at 15 I was 6’3” and weighed 150 lbs., which made it easy to fight off my advances), bliss
and disaster alternated. My first love played the alto sax, which probably says a lot about my devotion to Art Pepper. She loved marshmallow crème, laughed at my
jokes, and was a great kisser.

But I began a long tradition of finding someone who could
bear the extravagant weight of my urgent, undeveloped, and unmitigated emotional demands. I
was scrawny and needy, and socially retarded. No one could more theatrically
misinterpret reality than I could, and still can. I could perform love, I
could act the swain. I wrote poems, sang songs, acted like a clown, ached,
fought, made love, burned with despair. But I still hadn’t a clue.

In addition, be narcissistic and bipolar impairs
selection skills. For years I found myself involved with women who were
dangerously unstable, coldly remote, or simply baffled and increasingly enraged
by the gap between my occasionally charming initial self-presentation and the
swamp of dysfunction I would unleash as soon as she relaxed. After which I would stagger away
from the burning crash site, wondering what went wrong.

Wanting is a kind of thirst that is satisfied only shortly.
In my case, it has been largely poisonous. Desire is theft. Love is music. And
I can barely tell them apart. What’s love, then? Would true love prevail?

Approaching the 20-year mark of my (so far) successful
second marriage – successful denoting purely that it is still in effect – I can
say that I am just grateful I haven’t been beaten to death in my sleep yet. (A
displaced paramour once pulled a gun on me, a unique and refreshing experience
I wouldn’t recommend to anyone.)

After many years, it finally is what it is. Little is like
we thought it might be, and we are very different than we imagined we might be.
Life has ground away at us, revealing ourselves to each other as completely as
two people can. We have seen the best and the worst of each other, and I think
that if you can do that and not flinch, and keep looking into the other’s eyes,
you have something.

Real love is forged by the demands of necessity. Real love
mysteriously accrues as the years are lived together. It’s no musical, no
slow-motion gambol at waves' edge. You have to be damn stubborn and endure.

At the same time, I am learning to let go of how I think
things should be between us, of creating some kind of static template of
relationship satisfaction. Developing, despite myself, some compassion.

And humility. Another annoying problem is that someone that close
to you can call you on your shit. Every time. There’s no place to hide. And so, by dint of the constant erosion caused by being wrong, only over the course
of the last decade have I learned that I may actually BE wrong at times and,
even worse, that my wife is right. And of course, once one person might be
right . . . you can probably see how trying this has all been for her, she’s
explained it to me a thousand times.

Love is a verb that must be incessantly acted upon, never
shifting from present to past tense. Infatuations just happen. Love is a job, and its own reward. The tiny pleasures and hard-won
satisfactions of each day are the rewards of working together to create a life
and a home together.

When I keep my head down and keep pushing through, somehow
it works. It’s a closeness and peace that flares up protectingly when times are
tough. It can’t be erased or taken from. It’s knowing who I can count on, and
finally accepting that I can be counted on, too. Maybe that’s what love really
is for me – knowing that I am capable of transcending my own selfishness and
stupidity, at least with my single someone, at least some of the time.

About Me

This award-winning independent writer and editor returned to the place where he grew up after years as a wandering comedian. It's beautiful here. He served in a variety of capacities for the Boulder International Film Festival from 2006 through 2014. His writing portfolio includes stories written on topics ranging from grand opera to midget wrestling, for a diverse array of magazines, newspapers and websites worldwide -- including Film International, Westword, Boulder Magazine, Power Pickin', Parterre, Understanding Our Gifted, Movie Habit, Backstage, Muso, 5280, EnCompass, Senses of Cinema, Boulder Jewish News and . . . Philly Sports Faithful, for some reason. Also poet, playwright, screenwriter, blah blah blah. Check out his work at brad-weismann.com, filmpatrol.com and obitpatrol.com.

PM Dawn; Of the Heart Of the Soul and of the Cross: The Utopian Experience

Ramones, Ramonesmania

Richard and Linda Thompson, Pour Down Like Silver

Richard Pryor, Wanted

Richard Thompson, Henry the Human Fly

Robert Klein, New Teeth

Rodgers and Hammerstein, Oklahoma/Carousel/The King and I

Roger Miller, The Return of Roger Miller

Rolling Stones, Some Girls

Shostakovich, Symphony #4 - Inbal, Wiener Symphoniker

Sibelius, Symphony 5 (final version) -- Vanska, Lahti Symphony

Sly and the Family Stone, Anthology

Steeley Dan, Pretzel Logic

Stevie Wonder, Songs in the Key of Life

Stravinsky, Les Noces -- Bernstein

Strength in Numbers, The Telluride Sessions

Talking Heads, Fear of Music

The Kingston Trio, The Kingston Trio

The Kinks, Lola Versus Powerman and the Moneygoround, Part One

The Mothers, Cruisin' with Ruben and the Jets

The Mothers, We're Only in It for the Money

The Velvet Underground & Niko

Tom Tom Club, Tom Tom Club

Tom Waits, Nighthawks at the Diner

Uncle Earl, Waterloo Tennessee

Van Morrison, Beautiful Vision

Village Music of Bulgaria/Bulgarian Folk Music

Vivaldi, The Four Seasons -- Zuckerman

Was (Not Was), Born to Laugh at Tornadoes

Ween, Chocolate and Cheese

Willie Dixon, The Chess Box

Willie Nelson, Shotgun Willie

XTC, English Settlement

" . . . you've got to stand up for the imaginative world, the imaginative element in the human personality, because I think that's constantly threatened . . . People do have imagination and sensibilities, and I think that does need constant exposition." -- John Read

"To disseminate my subjective thoughts and ideas, I stealthily hide them in a cloak of entertaining storytelling, since the depth of my thinking, shallow at best, might be challenged by erudite experts." -- Curt Siodmak